Re: Should g_get_homedir use $HOME

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Eric Gillespie <epg pretzelnet org> writes:
> I think you resolved this bug in the wrong direction.  Your own
> example of the user with the high-contrast theme gets broken by your
> resolution.  The hand-waving about GConf and stuff is irrelevant; i
> have a .gtkrc and i expect it to be respected even when i su.  All the
> GTK+ programs i currently use do that.

We are moving this kind of config to the display, so all GTK apps
connected to the same display get the same theme, regardless of their
home dir. You want to handle the general case of running apps on the
display owned by a different user or on a different machine, $HOME is
pretty much a bad special-case hack IMO. We need to be able to rely on
the user<->homedir one-to-one mapping to have any kind of sanity in
app development.
 
> Really, i'd prefer if all these GNOME programs didn't go stomping
> around in my home directory without me telling them to.  I have these
> stupid .gnome{,_private} and .gconf directories that have no business
> existing, since i've never meddled with the configuration of any of
> the GNOME programs i've used.  Certainly GNOME is not the only
> offender, but complaining about KDE apps here is even more off-topic
> here than complaining about GNOME apps :).

There's state to be saved, not just configuration. (Though .gconf
should contain only configuration - there was a bug in Nautilus 1 that
would give you a .gconf despite not touching prefs, and in GNOME 2
some apps probably try to put little pieces of state in there, but I
usually try to shame people into not doing that.) In any case .gnome
has never had the "configuration only" recommendation that gconf does.

Havoc